Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising firm previously linked to the delivery of zero-click spyware, is the top bidder for Starlink ad impressions in 105 countries, according to a new report from Reuters. Researchers say it all points to a large-scale tracking effort aimed at users of SpaceX’s satellite internet service.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, posted on X that data from TrendAI suggest the existence of a “worldwide surveillance op targeting @Starlink users.”
Discover-Tech was previously named in Citizen Lab’s October 15th report as the buyer of ordinary-looking ads that delivered Candiru spyware to devices at Al Jazeera without any user interaction. Candiru is an Israeli mercenary spyware vendor (now rebranded as Integrity Labs) that develops tools capable of silently compromising phones and computers. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security added Candiru to their trade restriction list, known as the Entity List, over concerns it supplied surveillance technology used against journalists, activists, and government officials.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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You should assume your ISP is a hostile party, in cahoots with you goverment’s intelligence services. A fail close VPN and adblockers at network level as well as hardened and isolated VM for public content consumption should be your SOP.
Can you clarify here, are you suggesting that any internet browsing should be via VM?
Yes. Use QubesOS.
I wouldn’t touch the internet without it.
Preferably. See the Whonix approach in Qubes OS. There you can be only targeted as a class of Tor users, not as an individual. The blast radius of system compromise is limited, requiring a privilege escalation to break out of containment.